FOCUS

Design, evaluation, validation, implementation and verification of a fault-tolerant infrastructure based on FTT-Ethernet that could be used to support the execution of adaptive, yet highly-dependable, distributed control applications.

DESCRIPTION

This work is supported in part by the Spanish Science and Innovation Ministry with grant DPI2011-22992, and in part by FEDER funding.
Embedded systems are an ubiquitous technology of strategic importance in modern economics. They play a central role in sectors such civil avionics, automotive, railway signaling, energy distribution and telecommunications; sectors in which Europe has traditionally had a leading position. Embedded systems are typically subject to constraints related to weight, space and energy consumption, and they have to be designed so as to fulfill strict requirements on dependability and real-time performance.
Traditional embedded systems used to be applied in known and fixed environments, which could be predicted in advance. That situation fostered the development of static techniques that guarantee achieving the desired real-time and dependability attributes. Nevertheless, the current tendency is to apply embedded systems also in dynamic environments where the operating conditions may change frequently and in an unpredictable manner. This situation requires development of a novel class of embedded systems, which should be able to automatically adjust its internal strategies in response to changes of the dynamic environment, while keeping the system performance within the desired levels. Such systems are called adaptive embedded systems, and require services supporting flexibility, real-time and dependability at different levels of the system architecture, such as the OS and the network.
FTT-Ethernet is a very promising network technology for developing adaptive distributed embedded systems, as it already provides certain communication services that are very well suited for adaptivity. However, it still lacks the fault tolerance mechanisms that would provide the desired dependability levels. Solving this limitation of FTT-Ethernet would represent a significant step forward in the development of the future adaptive distributed embedded systems, especially due to the remarkable current interest in using Ethernet for embedded systems because of cost considerations.
This research project addresses the design, implementation and validation of a highly-dependable communication infrastructure based on FTT-Ethernet. The aim of our project is stated in three objectives: 1) Achieve an increasing level of dependability for Ethernet infrastructures based on an FTT-Enabled Switch, by means of the incorporation of basic fault tolerance mechanisms; 2) Thoroughly evaluate the correctness of the design as well as the achieved level of dependability; 3) Develop a prototype of said infrastructure in order to obtain experimental results and thus validate the whole infrastructure proposed.